Why this would be of any interest to you, I don’t know, but I’m having a lot of fun playing around with blosxom. As you can see, I’ve added a category panel there on the right side, using the category plugin by John Todd Larason. I had to mess around with a bit, though, because of the idiosyncrasies of the HTML flavour that I’m using right now, but it’s all good.

I also realized that the archive plugin (seen on the left) emits borked HTML. I only recognized this because this page was not rendering legibly at all on Safari. (This was the first time I had tried rendering my page with Safari, as I usually use Camino.) I then used HTML Tidy to try and debug the resultant code. (Using this chain of commands: rm index.html; wget http://blog.fatoprofugus.net; tidy index.html 2> blog.error; emacs index.html & less blog.error so that I could correlate the errors to their location in the resultant HTML code, thereby editing the proper component. I can’t help but wishing that flavours were written in a single XML file that could be validated, but I guess it still wouldn’t have caught this error.)

How is the archive plugin’s output borked? Apparently, it emits list elements like so (I am eliding the hyperlink tags to avoid too much clutter):

<ul class="archives">
<li>2003</li>
<ul>
<li>Aug</li>
</ul>
</ul>

Apparently, this is badly formed. (I figured this after reading XHTML: Lists.) Nested lists need to start within an <li> element. Like so:

<ul class="archives">
<li>2003
<ul>
<li>Aug</li>
</ul></li>
</ul>

I changed the archive plugin a bit to do this [modified archive plugin], but I also changed a couple of things in order to deal with the aforementioned idiosyncrasies of this html flavour I am using, so you might want to revert those changes.

So, thus far, my page renders legibly in the major Mac OS X-only browsers: Camino, Safari, and IE 5.2. (Why am I including IE since it is obviously available for Windows? Well, the Mac OS X version renders CSS better than it’s Windows’ counterpart. I have been told that it has features that aren’t even available in IE 6 for Windows. Go figure. Just another reason to buy Longhorn, I suppose, and continue to line Bill’s pockets. But that is another rant.)

I figure the page should be good in Mozilla and in Firebird, since they use the same rendering engine as Camino. I’d be interested to see what it looks like in Galeon, which was my favorite browser when I ran Linux (remarkably, there is a Fink port to OS X. Galeon has one awesome feature that I haven’t seen on any other browser: crash recovery. When you start it up after a crash, it will try to reload all the pages that you had open—with prompting, of course, since you could otherwise theoretically get caught in a loop.) It also uses the Gecko rendering engine. Now if I can figure out how to get it to run properly on OS X. I have no idea when I’ll get a chance to test it on Windows, but I suppose I should.